About irrlicht, I'm not sure is a good choice ... It's better to use 3dgs if you are looking for speed.

About Ogre even if only a rendering engine, the community provide workflow and if you are using blender for the character or level design you can export them easily. It's supports python with pyogre. Physics with newton and Ode, shaders and some powerfull contributions. Some game of Ogre look AAA games I've never seen an irrlicht reach this point. Anyway you need programming but for me there is no way to make a decent game without programming.

About S2 you don't need to rely on 3ds warez since many modeler tools export in this format. You can use blender to export your character in 3ds format